Sunday, October 28, 2012

“The palace is, or seems to be, a miracle of lightness. The European observer is accustomed to heaviness of foundation and lightness of summit. In the ducal palace the expectation is disappointed. The long double-storeyed arcade, at ground level, creates the illusion of space and airiness. The deep shadows within the arcade act as a metaphor for the foundation. The darkness has the illusion of volume. The upper part of the façade is made up of tiny marble pieces of pink and white and grey, in the pattern of damask, shimmering in the light of the lagoon. The whole structure has the exact proportions of a cube, but it is a cube of light. The palace might be said to float like the city itself. It is not, in Proust’s phrase, under the dominion of death.”

Friday, October 26, 2012

“There is now an island of the dead close to the city. S. Michele once sustained a monastery devoted to learning but in the nineteenth century a cemetery was constructed here, so that the cadavers would no longer be close to the living population of Venice. The bodies are placed in little marble drawers like an enormous sideboard of mortality. The church of S. Michele, built some four centuries earlier, is like a whitened sepulchre guarding the site. Its recumbent corpses outnumber by many times the inhabitants of the city.”

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

“El cagalibri” (The Book Pooper), statue of Niccolò Tommaseo
by Fancesco Barzaghi, Campo Santo Stefano, San Marco
Venice, September 2012

“Nicolò Tommaseo, the Risorgimento ideologue who was Manin’s right-hand man during the 1848 insurrection, is commemorated by the statue in the middle of Campo Santo Stefano; the unfortunate positioning of the pile of books (representing Tommaseo’s voluminous literary output) has earned the statue the nickname il Cagalibri – the Book-shitter.”

Monday, October 22, 2012

“Generally referred to as La Salute, this crown jewel of 17th-century baroque architecture proudly reigns at a commercially and aesthetically important point, almost directly across from the Piazza San Marco, where the Grand Canal empties into the lagoon. The first stone was laid in 1631 after the Senate decided to honor the Virgin Mary of Good Health for delivering Venice from a plague. They accepted the revolutionary plans of a young, relatively unknown architect, Baldassare Longhena (who would go on to design, among other projects, the Ca’ Rezzonico). He dedicated the next 50 years of his life to overseeing its progress (he would die 1 year after its inauguration but 5 years before its completion). The only great baroque monument built in Italy outside of Rome, the octagonal Salute is recognized for its exuberant exterior of volutes, scrolls, and more than 125 statues and rather sober interior, though one highlighted by a small gallery of important works in the sacristy.”

(As in the Arsenal of the Venetians
Boils in the winter the tenacious pitch
To smear their unsound vessels o'er again,
For sail they cannot; and instead thereof
One makes his vessel new, and one recaulks
The ribs of that which many a voyage has made;
One hammers at the prow, one at the stern,
This one makes oars, and that one cordage twists,
Another mends the mainsail and the mizzen;
Thus, not by fire, but by the art divine,
Was boiling down below there a dense pitch
Which upon every side the bank belimed.)

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

“The striking neo-Gothic hulk of the best-known factory complex on the island, the Mulino Stucky, was built in the late 19th century and employed 1500 people. Now it is a star of the Hilton Hotel chain, with 380 rooms, a conference centre and several restaurants and bars. The original façade has been preserved and it is hard to miss when looking across the western end of the Zattere. The factory was shut in 1954 and sat long in dignified silence. The Hilton chain saved it from the wrecking ball in 2000 and opened in mid-2007. The views from the main tower (if you manage to wander in) are breathtaking.”

Sunday, October 7, 2012

“Born in Dresden in 1858, Heinrich Zille’s family moved to Berlin when he was a child. A lithographer by trade, he became the first prominent artist to evoke the social development of the city as the tendrils of modernity reached Berlin, creating an instantly recognisable style in his drawings of everyday life and real people, often featuring the bleak Hinterhöfe (inner courtyards) around which so much of their lives revolved. Even during his lifetime Zille was acknowledged as one of the definitive documenters of his time, and since his death in 1929 his prolific photographic work has also come to be seen as a valuable historical record.”

Saturday, October 6, 2012

“There were many folk stories of the devil walking confidently over the bridges and along the calli of the city. He was reported to have taunted the mason working on the Rialto bridge, for example, with the claim that no one could build so wide an arch of stone. He offered to perform the work in exchange for the soul of the first person who crossed the bridge. It turned out to be the mason’s infant son.”